Who is heraclitus

All things come to be, temporarily, and then pass into cosmic fire. Heraclitus represents the harmony of two seeming antinomies: law and flux. The logos post Heraclitus has had a memorable career throughout Western thought: from Plato, to the Bible particularly in the Gospel According to John and Plotinus, and through Nietzsche.

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Exact language and thought are of paramount importance to him, since he conceives of the logos as both the underlying order in the cosmos and the soul's discourse upon it. Since the truth is complex and difficult to grasp, he uses the oracular style of Delphi and merely hopes to "indicate" the truth. He is important as one of the first Greek philosophers to take up the problem of knowledge, and he is undoubtedly the first to stress the importance of an understanding of the soul as a step toward understanding the external world order.

His writing provided much of the theoretical basis for Stoicism. Selected passages of Heraclitus's work with English translation and commentary are in G. Kirk and J. After 24 hours of his own idiosyncratic treatment a liniment of cow manure and baking in the sun , he died and was interred in the marketplace of Ephesus.

Work Back to Top Heraclitus is recorded as having written a single book, "On Nature" , divided into three discourses, one on the universe , another on politics and a third on theology. The book was deposited or stored in the great Temple of Artemis in Ephesus as were many other treasures and books of the time and made available to visitors for several centuries after Heraclitus' death.

However, his writings only survive today in fragments quoted by other later authors. In his work, he used puns, paradoxes, antitheses, parallels and various rhetorical and literary devices to construct expressions that have meanings beyond the obvious. The reader must therefore solve verbal puzzles he was also nicknamed "The Riddler" , and, by so doing, learn to read the signs of the world. In fact, he deliberately made his philosophical work obscure , so that none but the already competent would be able to understand it.

Unlike many of the other Pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus believed that the world is not to be identified with any particular substance , but rather consists of a law-like interchange of elements , an ongoing process governed by a law of perpetual change , or Logos , which he symbolized by fire.

According to Heraclitus, fire provides a kind of standard of value for other stuffs, but it is not identical to them, and is not the unique source of all things, because all stuffs are equivalent and one thing is transformed into another in a cycle of changes. According to Heraclitus, the world is in an eternal state of "becoming" , and all changes arise from the dynamic and cyclic interplay of opposites. Opposites are necessary for life, he believed, but they are unified in a system of balanced exchanges , with pairs of opposites making up a unity.

Thus, one road carries some travelers out of a city, while it brings others back in ; the way up is also the way down ; earth changes to fire and fire changes to earth, etc. In this, he posits an equal and opposite reaction to every change and, in his theory of the equivalence of matter , a primitive law of conservation. Heraclitus was a huge admirer of the oracle of Delphi and his enigmatic sayings.

He loved paradoxes, enigmas, and compressing complex meanings in brief sentences. As a result, it was very difficult for anyone to decipher the meaning hidden behind his puzzles. According to the tragic poet Scythinus:.

Socrates had a similar view. Socrates found Heraclitus difficult and he had access to the text in its original language. So it is no wonder that by the Middle Ages, people would find the Ephesian almost incomprehensible. The only way to know the Greek philosopher is through fragments of his work quoted by other ancient authors, like Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, the Stoic philosophers, and early Christian thinkers.

As we saw, he spent many years alone, away from society. Also, he often makes pessimistic statements about the majority of people saying that they are unable to listen to the Logos cosmic reason. Raphael painted Michelangelo as Heraclitus sitting alone in the foreground of the image. Especially Greek philosophers from the cities of Ionia were interested in uncovering what things are made of. First Thales c. Then Anaximenes 6th century BCE stated that it was air.

Anaximander c. Heraclitus took a stance on the matter. For him, fire was the original and most basic element of all. The element out of which everything was made. However, there is a difference between Heraclitus and the other monists. He mainly used fire as a metaphor for change, which he thought was the real basis of the universe.

Just think of fire for a bit. It never stays the same, it is never calm, it is always in movement. Heraclitus believed that nothing can stay the same for long.

Everything constantly changes and takes the form of other things.